Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Grammar and more grammar…

Sorry I have not been posting on here lately. I have been really busy trying to get Lilly caught up to her grade level. She is reading on a 5th grade level but her comprehension is not there yet. She does wonderful with conversational English, but needs the foundation to work off of to get ready for grade level work next year. The last couple of weeks we have been spending at least 2 hours a day 3x a week on grammar as a family. We are working to build up her vocabulary as well. We gave her a children’s dictionary to use and each week she has 20 words to find, write twice and memorize.

We are currently working on verbs and nouns. I am so thankful for text books like Rod n Staff that help me teach this very important subject. I love Explode the Code workbooks too. Doing both of these at least three days a week is helping Lilly catch up slowly but surely! We are so proud of how far she has come in just 9 weeks of being home.

To help them learn picking out nouns in a sentence - I write a bunch of words on the board – then I put Who and What at the top. They are to put the words under the correct question they answer.

Then I write sentences on the board – they must tell me what the nouns are and what question they answer.

I will be doing this exercise and ones like it all summer long – find the noun, verb, pronoun, adjective, etc. Please pray that Lilly catches up so she can begin to work on grade level subjects in the fall, like she really wants to do. Right now it sets her up for failure and that is not what we want to do. We want her to feel joyful doing school work and not be discouraged in any way.

I’m very proud of Jordan and Abigail who are working very hard at grammar – they are both doing a wonderful job!

Our family loves to learn about history – our favorite time period is ancient history. I don’t simply read out loud to them – I act out what I am reading to make it more fun and interesting. I want to keep five children (ages 5-12 yrs old) all engaged and help them remember what we learn each day. We finished learning about the Greeks and Romans the last two weeks. I had lots of fun pretending to fight in the many wars and being a Gladiator for a few days. No, I don’t dress up. I might start using puppet however, because I think that might help with math facts!

What are some fun things you do to help keep your children engaged during the school day?